Food for Thought: The pressure cooker is back

Tuesday

Click inside for the weekly food rail, with items on modern pressure cookers, an easy recipe for Aloha Burgers, the latest from The Beer Nut, and more. Or check out these links:

Works Well: Pressure cooker

Your grandmother’s venerable pressure cooker has returned, adding modern safety measures. They still come with the boast of cooking three to 10 times faster than “ordinary methods,” even microwaves. We’re talking chicken cacciatore in eight minutes.

Today’s cookers do double duty with racks for steaming and canning. A 6-quart model is the family size.

Drain 3 tablespoons pineapple juice into a bowl and add teriyaki sauce. Add pineapple slices and marinate for two hours.

Shape beef into four patties. Place in a baking dish. Pour the teriyaki sauce mixture over patties. Marinate for 5-10 minutes.

Melt butter in a skillet. Sauté onion until tender, about 5 minutes. Grill or broil burgers, cooking until no long pink, adding cheese in last two minutes. Place pineapple on grill or under broiler to heat through. Layer lettuce and onion on bottom of buns. Top with burgers, cheese, pineapple and bacon. Serves 4

- Open the carton and make sure that the eggs are clean and the shells are not cracked.

- Refrigerate promptly.

- Store eggs in their original carton and use them within 3 weeks for best quality.

- Cooked eggs, including hard-boiled eggs, should not sit out for more than two hours. Within two hours, either reheat or refrigerate.

- Use hard-cooked eggs (in the shell or peeled) within 1 week after cooking.

-- U.S. Food and Drug Administration

Did You Know?

Researchers in Spain say the quality of a tomato depends on more on temperature than on its exposure to natural light.

Food Quiz

What kind of cheese is used in German cheesecakes?

A. Ricotta
B. Cream cheese
C. Quark
D. Mascarpone

Answer is at bottom of column

Wise to the Word: Food French

You need to know a little francais in some restaurants:

- Table d’hôte: Meaning “table of the host,” refers to items served as a complete meal with several courses for the price of the entree.

- A la carte: Each item priced separately.

- Prix fixe: Fixed price, the price of a complete meal is set in advance, might include several choices.

-- The Repository

Number to Know: 25.6

Calories in 1 cup of diced, raw rhubarb. – calorielab.com

The Dish On …

“Ham: An Obsession with the Hindquarter” by Bruce Weinstein and Mark Scarbrough

A ham is a hefty hunk of flesh and bone, weighing in somewhere between 12 and 30 pounds. Fresh or cured, ham can be prepared in innumerable ways. And (here’s the clincher) ham is incredibly delicious.

In “Ham: An Obsession with the Hindquarter,” Bruce Weinstein and Mark Scarborough take readers on a globetrotting tour of the whole wide wonderful world of ham, from the Philippines to Spain, the Caribbean, the American South, and their own home corner of rural Connecticut.

Gifted raconteurs and talented cooks, the pair ham it up with a series of hilarious stories and pig out on a hundred mouth-watering recipes.

From the Beer Nut’s Blog: Someone, please brew this

Almost every time I speak to a brewer about upcoming beers, one of my recommendations is always a coconut stout.

I think coconut would be the perfect flavor to add to a stout, particularly one with some nice chocolate undertones. Sure, there are a couple of coconut porters, but the only coconut stout I had was at a brewpub in Pittsburgh (and I loved it).

Come on brewers, this is a good idea. Take a shot and brew a coconut stout.

To read more from the Beer Nut, visit http://blogs.townonline.com/beernut/

Food Quiz Answer

C. Quark, a creamy, lower-fat cheese made with a lactic-acid starter instead of rennet.

GateHouse News Service

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